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Sunday, 19 April 2020

Vis-à-vis this other Hero’s Journey, this earlier commentary on the UX of going off the reservation and visiting websites outside of social media’s walled gardens, and this brutally accurate observation that in terms of open access, security, tracking and general skezziness that news sites have taken on the reputation that was accorded to porn sites a decade ago, this image from Mattsurelee (from Instagram, a platform we want no truck in either but thankfully brought to our notice from Nag on the Lake) really spoke to us.I fully empathise with how news outlets and reporters are not just underfunded and face withering and atrophy but are facing outright assault and hostility and we all need to do a better job of supporting newsrooms and local reporting, but at the same time, I don’t think this coy, bullying approach is the right one—especially for an established audience that has agency and makes the choice to return to a trusted source and be made to jump through hoops and turn tricks to prise open content, ultimately made to find it syndicated elsewhere.